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Samurai Baseball vs. Baseball in Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Charles W. Hayford
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Baseball fans, lovers of a good fight, and those who are curious about how we go about understanding Japan, will all welcome “Baseball and Besuboru In Japan and The U.S.” (Studies in Asia online), a group of essays growing out of a conference at Michigan State University last year. Michael Lewis in his Introduction does concede that baseball is a game but is “also a powerful economic force, a ladder for social mobility, a vessel freighted with national symbols, and for many something of a sacred cultural preserve with practices (or is it rituals?) that delineate them from us.” Lewis reports that there was great debate at the conference over “nature versus nurture, or cultural essentialism versus shared solutions to shared problems.”

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Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , April 2007, e4
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2007

References

Notes

[1] Baseball has long been fodder for international history: Richard C. Crepeau, “Pearl Harbor: A Failure of Baseball?” The Journal of Popular Culture 15.4 (1982): 67-74; Donald Roden, “Baseball and the Quest for National Dignity in Meiji Japan,” The American Historical Review 85.3 (1980).

[2] For a fuller study, see his Diamonds around the Globe: The Encyclopedia of International Baseball (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005).

[3] The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: Baseball Samurai Style (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977); You Gotta Have Wa: When Two Cultures Collide on the Baseball Diamond (Macmillan 1989); The Meaning of Ichiro: The New Wave from Japan and the Transformation of Our National Pastime (Warner Books, 2004; retitled for the 2005 paperback to The Samurai Way of Baseball).

[4] The film clip “Samurai Baseball” presents Japanese baseball as a different game in about two minutes. The PBS Frontline program “American Game, Japanese Rules,” (PBS Video, 1990) has more talking heads. “Mr. Baseball” (1990) stars Tom Selleck as an aging hitter who goes to Japan and runs into problems undreamed of in Lost in Translation (see Alan Chalk Guide to Japanese Films at the University of Illinois Asian Education Media Service site). Beat Takeshi's Boiling Point (1990) shows a very Japanese but very unsamurai-like little league team that runs up against yakuza.

[5] Quoted on William Kelly's website (below).

[6] Kelly's paper for the East Lansing conference is not included in the online conference volume but the website for his Yale course, “Japan: The Anthropology of an Alternate Modernity (2002)” and his home page, William Kelly, make some of his essays available on line.

[7] William Kelly, “Caught in the Spin Cycle: An Anthropological Observer at the Sites of Japanese Professional Baseball,” in Susan O. Long, ed., Moving Targets: Ethnographies of Self and Community in Japan. (Ithaca, 2000); William Kelly, “Blood and Guts in Japanese Professional Baseball,” in Sepp Linhard and Sabine Fruhstuck, ed., The Culture of Japan as Seen through its Leisure (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998): 95-111; William Kelly, “Is Baseball a Global Sport? America's ‘National Pastime’ as a Global Sport,” Global Networks 7.2 (2007): 15 pp. (forthcoming; kindly supplied by the author).

[8] Whiting's talk, The Samurai Way of Baseball and the National Character Debate, was also published with revisions at Japan Focus (September 29, 2006), with an introduction by Jeff Kingston, who teaches contemporary Japanese politics at Temple University, Tokyo.

[9] Whiting, “Samurai Way of Baseball,” Japan Focus, n. 35.

[10] See Henry Smith, Learning from Shogun: Japanese History and Western Fantasy (Santa Barbara: Program in Asian Studies, 1980).

[11] William Kelly, “Caught in the Spin Cycle,” 144-145.

[12] Kelly, “Caught In the Spin Cycle, p. 141-143.

[13] You Gotta Have Wa, p. 35.

[14] Theodore C. Bestor, Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004): 16.